Senior Vice President, Product Designer

We're seeking a future team member for the role of Senior Vice President, Product Designer, Enterprise Custody Services to join our team. This role is located in New York, NY.

Custody operations is one of the most complex operational environments in global finance. Hundreds of applications. Thousands of people. We're redesigning how it all works. Not incrementally. Structurally. We're looking for someone who sees that kind of complexity and gets excited.

How we work

This team is building experience design from the ground up for one of BNY's largest platforms. We're defining the model now, which means the person in this role has real influence over how design operates, not just what it produces.

We use AI tools as part of how we work: research synthesis, prototyping, workflow analysis, and design system infrastructure. It's part of our daily practice, and we expect designers on this team to work that way too.

We believe design decisions should be grounded in evidence, not in the inherited opinions of people closest to the system. This is a cultural shift, and we're leading it intentionally.

About this role

This is a hybrid role: senior individual contributor with direct influence on a small design team. You'll mentor and guide three designers, set the quality bar and strategic direction, and work as a peer to product owners and engineering leadership. You won't manage the team administratively. You'll lead it through the work.

The role is roughly 80% strategic and research-focused, 20% hands-on design. Prior domain expertise in financial services matters far less than your ability to learn fast, ask the right questions, and bring rigorous design thinking to genuinely complex problems.

What you'll do

Contribute to a persona framework for a 100+ application platform. Custody operations isn't one user group; it's dozens of specialized roles across settlements, instruction capture, corporate events, tax, and client services. You'll bring research depth and service design rigor to a behavioral persona framework that becomes the shared language for design and product decisions.

Map and redesign end-to-end operational workflows. You'll use service design methods to map workflows as they are, identify where they break down, and design experiences that eliminate, automate, or unify manual steps.

Bring user research best practices to the platform design team. Contextual inquiry with operations teams, usability testing, and research synthesis that grounds design decisions in evidence.

Drive platform experience coherence. Over a hundred applications, built by different teams at different times, with no shared experience strategy. You'll define what coherence looks like and create the principles, patterns, and standards that move us toward it.

Design for human-AI collaboration. The platform is introducing AI capabilities (automated rule generation, exception triage, intelligent search, predictive processing) and needs a designer who can shape the interaction patterns: confidence indicators, escalation paths, transparency contracts, override mechanisms.

Mentor the design team and raise the bar. You'll work alongside three designers, providing critique, coaching, and strategic direction. You'll also influence how product owners and engineers think about user experience.

Support design strategy communication to leadership. You'll contribute to the leadership narrative at executive altitude, connecting design work to operational outcomes.

What you bring

Required:

• 10–12 years of experience in product or experience design, with significant depth in service design: mapping end-to-end workflows, creating service blueprints, designing across channels and touchpoints
• Demonstrated experience leveraging user research methods (contextual inquiry, usability testing, research synthesis) to ground design decisions in evidence
• Experience shaping persona frameworks or user segmentation models for complex, multi-role operational environments
• Systems-level thinking: you see the whole